SL Creativity

Attribution in SL

Mark Wallace over at 3pointD asked if SL’s IP Rights infringe on Innovation and an interesting discussion followed in the comments. Intellectual Property (IP) considerations have been at the heart of the discussions around SL and for good reason. Linden Lab did famously let residents retain IP rights over their creations which helped kick start this booming SL economy we’re experiencing now.

How you currently grant rights over your creations were based on Creative Commons licenses, so you can choose to allow other residents to copy and/or modify your work. The system has worked pretty well, but a discussion of possible improvements could be very interesting.

I have heard frequently that SL is not regarded as very conducive to larger scale collaborations. I know that we are seeing more and more of them but as it is now it is more often with one clear owner that contracts creators with special skills to help out. The current system only lets you see who owns an who created a given object. Considering how often these collaborative endeavors are motivated by things like social capital maybe this is something to look at.

It would be interesting to talk about how SL can make “Who did what” in creative collaborations more visible. In for instance Wikipedia we’re seeing people being attributed in a sort of quantitative manner: You see who edited but it is a little harder to get an overview over what they edited. Rethinking a model for giving good attribution in SL would be an interesting experiment.

Getting down to business

3pointD has an interesting post on American Apparel opening a SL show room for their real world clothes. You could off course say that it is a perfect fit with clothes already being a massive part of the growing SL economy, but it really makes sense to me on a number of levels.
Continue reading Getting down to business…

Towards richer interactions

I am thinking a lot about how Second Life offers these rich media interactions and how this affects its ability as a collaborative development platform. Right now chat is what you get out of the box. I have tried Vivox and Skypecasts and it is remarkable how these profoundly changes how you perceive people in SL; for better or worse. Some of the illusion is certainly lost and I was wondering about ways to do this more on SL terms and stumbled upon this video of Phillip Torrone of Make showing of some interesting new technology:

[Via Reuben Steiger’s Weblog]

[Update] A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat! (gotta love that mp reference) is an interesting post on approaches to facial (and other) expressions of avatars in various worlds including Second Life.

Taking notes with spaces and images

Earlier I discussed other ways to convey meaning and this is in that same vein. In Overcoming Memory Anxiety: A Left/Right-Brain Approach Lee Jordan-Anders writes:

The Greeks invented the art of memory (mnemosyne) and taught it as one of the five parts of rhetoric. It was an essential skill that enabled orators to deliver long speeches before the advent of the printing press and teleprompter. Their system involved the use of a series of places and images that organized and stimulated the speaker’s memory. Orators were taught to visualize a building with a fixed series of rooms. Into each room the speaker placed imaginary objects that would stimulate the progression of thoughts according to a prearranged plan. For example, the speaker preparing a speech on Greek Gods would imagine a lyre in one room, and that image would evoke the subject Apollo. The next room might contain an image of fire (Hades), the sea (Poseidon), or two lovers (Venus). As the speaker made his imaginary journey through these rooms, the memory of each subject area would be stimulated by the visual image of the related object. The same set of rooms was used for all speeches; only the objects inside the rooms were changed to reflect the different subject matters.

Skills such as these may have been replaced long ago because of our preference for text. But I wonder if something can be drawn from this intuitive connection between space image and memory on one side and this empowering effect Second Life seems to have on the other?

2D browsing in 3D

Recently the first step of a mozilla browser integration with Second Life was rolled out and almost instantly a clever little hack expanded the possibilities. The SL blogosphere was all over it and I just stumbled over Wired asking: Where’s the value proposition?

I’d like to have a little stab at that.

Continue reading 2D browsing in 3D…

Thinkers on Creativity - Monday June 12th @ 3PM SLT

I have been reading Gwyneth Llewelyn’s blog with great interest and contacted her to have a conversation about her thoughts on this project. She did me one better and setup this Thinkers on Creativity - The Big Question event for this coming Monday June 12, 2006 between 3:00PM - 4:30PM Second Life Time (SLT). I am really looking forward to this and if you are interested in these matters then feel very free to join us.

Other ways to convey meaning

In Garage cinema and the future media technology by Marc Davis talks about how computers can change how we convey meaning. The specific area he refers to is computational video, but I believe that these thoughts can be applied to creations within Second Life. Davis refers to two types of writing:

• Glottographic writing represents “sounds” (from the Greek glotto “tongue” or “language”).

• Semasiographic writing represents “meanings” (from the Greek semasi “meaning”)

Going to school most of us were taught in the realm of glottographic writing. In life we are constantly reading semasiographic writing such as pictures of moving images, but we very rarely write in this way. New technologies such as Second Life are lowering the barriers of entry in these alternative ways of conveying meaning; Davis thinks we are heading for a revolution in this regard and I believe him. We are perceptively well equipped towards these more visual possibilities for human expression and communication.

There are certainly challenges such as the lack of conventions and formalized languages, but the richer media are experiencing massive growth and this only seems to be accelerating. As a final I thought let me  paraphrase Davis:

Just as we often find it hard to imagine our own civilization before the advent of widespread literacy in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the next century our descendants will find it hard to understand that while everyone consumed media, so few had the tools to create them.

Understanding ways to engage

The basic idea of this work is that 75% of SL residents created something form scratch in the last 7 days. I boiled that down to the Question:

Do creative people become SL residents or do SL residents become creative people?

So I am interested in the 75% because it suggests that SL is getting high participation rates, but I needed a way to draw the map of how people engage with cultural products. In “The Cultural Economy of Fandom” John Fiske suggests a way to understand the nature of participation by describing 3 types of production:

1. Semiotic (creating your own personal meaning of media)
2. Enunciative (discussing these matters with others)
3. Textual (using existing media to create new media)

I drew this pyramid as a way to visualize how I imagine traditional media would look. By far the most are at the bottom and constructing their own personal meanings, whilst only the more hard core fans ever make it to number 2 and actually engage in discussions about this. Still an even smaller number then made it to the top of the pyramid and created new media.

So basically how high you made it in the pyramid would indicate how deeply you engaged. I am thinking about how this relates to SL; some questions of the top of my head:

• Does SL turn this model upside down? In my own personal experience I went to Help Island and created things in my first session, before I ever talked to anyone.

• If you accept the 75% then this would indicate a very large top section of the pyramid, does this invalidate this a way to understand things?
• Would drawing pyramids for diverse things such as Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, There give me tool for comparison?